If you're beginning an email program or you've been sending email already but know
that your emails are going to your recipients'junk folders, Comm100 explains how
to improve email deliverability. In this article, you'll learn how to optimize your
email program to give it the best chance of making into a user's inbox. This process
is called "deliverability" and is the first step to successful email marketing.

How to Avoid Your Emails Going to Junk Folder?

One of the greatest problems facing email marketers is making sure that your email
goes to the user's inbox instead of going to junk folder. When everything is driven
by whether a user opens an email, that means that the user needs to actually SEE
the email first. In truth, how many of us check our junk or spam folders regularly?

Avoiding your emails going to junk folder is one of the most complicated parts
of Email
Marketing (and the part that fails the most often). Here are ten tips to
keep your emails getting into the inbox.

Hotmail and Yahoo! both keep lists of approved senders. Once you're on that list,
that means you'll almost always go into the inbox. If you send a particularly spammy
email, however, you can be removed from the list. The process can be frustrating
and take a long time, but it's well worth it.

Avoid Your Emails Going to Junk Folder Tips No. 2:"Drips"the Messages

Spam filters at most email providers look to see how many messages you're sending
at a time. If you're sending to a large list, even if you have a fast and efficient
email sending server, have the server "drip" the messages out slowly. You really
don't want more than a couple thousand to hit any one email provider per hour if
you're playing it safely.

There are many reasons to break large email lists down into smaller ones, but the
best reason is that doing so will mean that the spam complaints that you receive
when you send your email won't be in one huge mass. It is inevitable that even loyal
subscribers sometimes mark you as spam. If you send your large list in smaller segments,
the email provider (Hotmail, MSN, etc.) will see less spam complaints bundled together
at one time.

Most, if not all, email providers' spam filters penalize your domain or IP with
a higher spam score (meaning there's a higher possibility of your emails going to
junk folder) if they see that you are sending emails to bad email accounts. A bad
email account is an address that doesn't exist, has been disabled or has a full
inbox. These addresses should be cleaned (or "pruned") from your email list regularly
to avoid this. If you allow them to add up on your list, you will eventually be
flagged as a spam provider.

Nobody likes it when somebody unsubscribes from their email list. However, providing
a clear way to unsubscribe (and then honoring that unsub quickly) means that users
are less likely to get frustrated and just mark you as spam. The number
one criterion for ending up in the junk box is the number of spam complaints that
you receive, so avoiding them at all costs is critical.

Avoid Your Emails Going to Junk Folder Tips No. 6: Become the Contact

Once a user has added you to his or her contact list, friend list or address book,
you will always end up in their inbox. Use every opportunity to encourage those
on your email list to add you as a contact. Comm100 suggests doing it in the email
sign up conformation email, on the confirmation page and during most customer service
transactions. A typical way to ask customers to do this is to say, "Ensure that
you continue to receive the quality information from us that you enjoy by adding
us to your contact list."

Avoid Your Emails Going to Junk Folder Tips No. 7: Test Your Email

Before you send your entire email list the message you've worked so hard on, send
a test message to each of the big email providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, MSN, Gmail, AOL
and one generic office address that is viewed in an Outlook client). Send the
test email using the exact same server and information that you'll use with your
main list. If the test ends up with most of your emails going to junk folder,
then it means you'll end up in the junk box on your main send also. The
pre-send test means that you can try different subject lines and email content to
try to figure out what sent you to spam.

Spam filters check for bad html code, particularly if it looks like the code was
done in Microsoft Word and then thrown into an email. Use a professional coder (preferably
one who has done email templates before and knows the best way to make them resolve
properly in an inbox) or a template provided by your email sending partner.

Embedding images in email
is not totally a bad idea, but sending an email that's all one big image file definitely
is, for many reasons. Foremost among reasons is that spam filters look for those
types of image-based emails . Big image files often carry hidden messages that would
normally get caught in spam filters (words like "free" and "Viagra"), so, when a
spam filter can't read any real text in an email and only sees an image, it assumes
the worst.

This one should be obvious! The more "spam-like" text and phrases your email uses,
the less likely it is to end up in the inbox. There are a number of free software
solutions to check the "spam score" of an email before you send it, but there are
also basic rules.

If you've seen it used in a spam message that you received, don't use it in your
own email message!

Even if you do all of these things and do them perfectly, your emails may still
end up in the junk folder. Email spam filter criteria change almost daily and can
be impacted by things that you have no control over. However, if you, as a habit,
send good email that your clients want, you'll get into the inbox more often than
not. Comm100 strongly suggest you to follow the above guidelines because,
once an email provider thinks that your email is spam, it is very hard to get back
into the inbox!

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